LHB Erector Set

June 4, 2013

The Guardian compares noir fiction's effects on the publishing to that of punk rock's on the music industry.

Maybe the time has come to jettison the whole literary fiction cadre and seek another way. In 1976 punk did its best to kill the bloated dinosaurs of progressive rock – and although that revolution was largely a failure, for a few years it did tilt the centre of gravity away from soulless upper-class music made by the likes of Genesis, towards energetic working-class bands like Joy Division, the Sex Pistols, the Undertones and the Specials, and towards cities like Manchester, Derry and Coventry. Crime writing could have a similar effect on publishing.

"I think Sherman was a very interesting pop-culture figure, at a moment when ethnic identity was first blossoming in America in the postwar period," Cohen tells NPR's Robert Siegel. "We had had a long period of Americanization, and Sherman appeared just at the moment when that was beginning to end."